Find the Right People, Fast!

Over 200 million people worldwide are using LinkedIn. Most of them have setup a profile and have accepted a fair number of invitations. Some of them are searching for people, like new clients or new colleagues. However, you would not believe how many people have yet to discover the Advanced Search.

Often when we deliver presentations or training sessions less than 50% of our audience knows about Advanced Search. But even if you know about it, you’ve got to know how to use it properly!

So, to make sure you make the most of your LinkedIn search, we’ll share some tips on finding the right people the easy way. When you are on your LinkedIn homepage, you will find the search bar at the top-right. And to the right of this, you will find the “Advanced” button. Click on this to open the advanced search page.

Regardless of the type of your LinkedIn account, these fields are available to you in “Advanced Search”:

Keywords: here you can type anything you want. LinkedIn then searches all fields (free text and lists).

First Nameand Last Name: self-explanatory.

Location: anywhere (in the world) or “located near” followed by your country.

Postal code: you can search in a radius around a specific postal code. This helps to fine-tune the results if that is helpful for your goal.

Title: You can choose to find only people who are currently holding that position, people who once had that position, or both (default). Remark: this search is based on the function, not the Professional Headline (= description under your picture on your Profile, by default this is your function, but we recommend changing it).

Company: You can choose to search only people who are currently working for acompany, people who worked for that company in the past, or both (default). Make sure you are using the correct spelling, e.g. PriceWaterhouseCoopersgivesdifferent results than PwC.

School: self-explanatory.

Industry: you can search all industries or individual ones.

Relationship: you can search all LinkedIn members or limit your search to people in your first-, second- and third-degree networks or beyond, or to people who belong to the same Groups as you do.

Language: you can limit your search to people speaking a certain language. However, we don’t recommend thisoption because you might miss a lot of people who haven’t implemented this function yet.

As you might get a bit overwhelmed by the number of options, we advise you to start with just 1 or 2 fields (e.g. title and location). Have a look at the number of results first. If it is a high number, start fine-tuning by adding more criteria. Tweak it to less than 100 results. Why? With the free account, you can view only the first 100 search results.Of course, you can also apply certain shortcuts to divide the number of results. The most obvious one is to play around with the location. Start nationwide, and then search region byregion or even city by city. This way, you can cover the whole country too, one step at a time!

To your success,

Bert Verdonck LinkedIn Expert | Speaker | Trainer | Mentor

PS:Looking for more LinkedIn tips? Use one or more of the 10 strategies to find the right people for you via the bestselling book “How to REALLY use LinkedIn” (a FREE download is available at www.reallyconnect.com).